It’s the story of five years, three houses,
90 students, 13 mentors, numberless neighborhood kids, plus: vegetarianism,
toilet paper, truth, gardening, jazzercise and “the ministry of
presence.” Since 1998, Calvin has established three experiments
in “intentional community” in three inner-city neighborhoods.
And this is how they evolved.

At the requisite Wednesday night dinner and business meeting at Harambee
House, Calvin senior Andrew Ippel of Rehoboth, N.M., presides. “We
are excited for a factoid,” he says to junior Aaron Iverson, of
Radnor, Ohio, who is the community’s trivia dispenser. Iverson has
something else on his mind: “What about the big white bowl that
takes up half of the bottom rack of the dishwasher? We could fit 50 plates
in there.” The group resolves to hand-wash the behemoth bowl.

Then it’s time for “jazzercise,” Harambee’s name
for the house’s business. Every house member, or jazzerciser, administers
some part of the community’s life: hospitality, maintenance, stewardship,
community, social, church or spiritual matters.

“I love how we share prayer requests on Sunday morning,”
senior Cicely Wiers, of Delaware, Ohio, comments during the discussion
of house spirituality. “I think it would be good to share a scripture.
From the Bible. Well, obviously, from the Bible,” she self-corrects,
“or the Book of Mormon.” The group screams with laughter.
Juggling the mundane, the sublime, and the ridiculous is a Harambee trait.

The ensuing conversation includes coupon storage, neighborliness, pumpkin
carving, church attendance and a group foot soak — another Wiers
scheme. Iverson even ponies up with a factoid: “Running a lawnmower
for an hour is like driving a car for 300 miles.”

Harambee, which is Swahili for “join together,” lives in
a commodious brick house at 656 Bates. Its sister houses in Project Neighborhood,
two more roomy brick residences, are Koinonia, the Greek word for “fellowship,”
at 1230 Lake Drive and Peniel, Hebrew for “face of God” (and
the name of the site where Jacob wrestled with God) at 425 Eastern Avene.

In each Project Neighborhood house, a group of Calvin students commits
to live in community for an academic year, mentored by an older adult
or married couple. Currently, there are 17 students and four mentors in
the program. Students who apply “are looking for a real, intentional
place to live where they are going to grow and be challenged in their
faith, but who also have a real interest and a heart for the city,”
said dean of residence life John Witte, who has worked with Project Neighborhood
since its beginning. The students share expenses and chores. They are
also required to take a weekly class related to the project and to perform
ten hours of community service a week.

Community Relations OfficeCoordinating Calvin's efforts to be an effective partner
in the Greater Grand Rapids and Western Michigan region

The First HouseProject Neighborhood actually began with a markedly un-communal
remark. In 1997, Calvin chaplain Dale Cooper was asked to conduct a retreat
of Young Life leaders, to be held at the Lake Michigan home of Bruce and
Sue Osterink, and Bruce was wary. “I’ll open my house,”
he stated, “but I’m not listening to any chaplain from Calvin
College.” Naturally, this remark led to a deep friendship, between
the Osterinks and Cooper and, more surprisingly, between the Osterinks
and the college. Neither Bruce — then the owner of both Osterink
Construction Co. and East Hills Athletic Club — nor Sue had attended
Calvin.

“They always liked to have dinner with the students and share a
little bit of their story and ask the students to share theirs,”
Witte remembered.

“Bruce became a mentor to three young men that year,” Cooper
said. “Out of that we began our mentoring program at Calvin.”

Before long, the Osterinks approached Cooper with a more ambitious idea,
a plan for establishing a group of Calvin students in an inner-city house.
It was a project with a two-fold goal, Cooper said: “To get them
to live in intentional community and to get them to put their arms around
the neighborhood.” A committee was launched, the sprawling Lake
Drive manse (formerly the property of Wedgewood Christian Youth and Family
Services) was purchased through donations, and a community was begun.

The original eight students moved into the house in the spring semester
of 1998 with the Osterinks, who mentored them and successive Koinonia
communities until June of 2000. “Those two-and-a half years were
probably as life-changing as we’ve ever had. They were difficult,
but also very rewarding. We went into it thinking we had something to
offer. We’d been involved with college kids for over ten years.
We also strongly felt that God wanted to teach us something in going there,”
Bruce said.

The nascent community wrote a “covenant,” something all of
the Project Neighborhood houses still do. The covenant is a values document
that describes both the group’s moral standards and their practical
means of expressing them. The concept of honest communication or “speaking
the truth in love,” was and remains a chief goal of the communities.

And then there were the nuts and bolts of living: “We had to agree
to how many times we were going to eat meals together, whether we were
going to do devotions together. We had to agree on what ‘clean’
was. You can imagine that my wife and college students had a different
idea of what clean was,” Osterink said.

"The difficult thing was laying down your own
agenda to pick up God’s agenda."

For these issues — and those of grocery shopping, house business,
romance, drinking and personality conflicts — the original Koinonians
relied on the principle of “unity,” meaning unanimous agreement.
“We did things when we all agreed. And sometimes agreement wasn’t
easy. The difficult thing was laying down your own agenda to pick up God’s
agenda,” said Osterink. Sometimes agendas conflicted over ply-count.
“Our disagreements were over which toilet paper to buy. Should we
buy the least expensive one or two-ply?” In another Koinonia incarnation,
several vegetarian students persuaded their communities to adopt a meatless
diet.

As tedious as some of these issues seem, Osterink believes they were
beneficial. “There were a lot of times I offended the students,
because I came from the business world where we don’t work that
way. It was a real learning experience for me — humbling. And there
were times when it took us two and three and four times coming back to
the table to reach unity.”

The bonds the Osterinks forged with their student communities remain
to this day. “We try to get together every month,” he said.
Their bond to the neighborhood also remains strong. After completing their
time as mentors, the couple, who sold their Ada residence during their
time in community, moved across the street from Koinonia House.

Growth of Project NeighborhoodSometime during Koinonia’s first year of existence,
First Christian Reformed Church offered to host a Calvin community in
their Bates Street church house. The Harambee Community was born in 1999.
The following year, courtesy of an identical offer from Eastern Avenue
CRC, Peniel opened its doors to community life.

Andrea Heerspink ’99, the mentor at Peniel, lived in the original
Koinonia House, and she reminisced about how different it was. “A
lot more structure and a lot more expectations,” she says about
the early years. “The college was in charge of it, where today,
we do what we need to do and follow some loose guidelines. Students are
comfortable with an atmosphere established by them instead of by the college.”

Nowadays, agreements are not necessarily unanimous. And the expectations
aren’t as high that the houses will drastically influence their
surrounding neighborhoods. “I have lived in my neighborhood four
years, and I’m just starting to get to know the neighbors. These
students live in these houses for nine months. I think we need to have
realistic expectations of what these students can accomplish in the neighborhood,”
said John Britton, the assistant dean of residence life and current Project
Neighborhood director.

Building Community The houses have developed distinct personalities through adapting
to their neighborhoods. Harambee and Peniel frequently host their neighborhoods’
children. “On a typical day, the doorbell rings every five minutes,”
said Miriam Ippel ’99, the Harambee mentor. And the relationships
between the community members and the children are anything but superficial.
Much of Harambee’s Wednesday conversation concerns their friendships
with the kids.

Harambee and Peniel also work in their sponsoring church’s youth
programs. “That’s why the church ones are sort of ideal. They
plug into existing programs that continue. We really like that model,”
Witte said.

Unique to Peniel is a vegetable patch full of watermelons, tomatoes,
beans, raspberries, strawberries, peppers and carrots, which is open to
neighborhood picking. “We never have red tomatoes. Everyone picks
our green tomatoes to make fried green tomatoes,” said senior Jennifer
Schmitkons, of Baldwinsville, N.Y., who has lived at Peniel for two years.

The Koinonia House has to work a little harder to find areas of service
in its Eastown neighborhood. Some of its residents tutor at Eastown Ministries
or work in other neighborhood organizations. “At first we weren’t
sure exactly how we were supposed to be involved in our community because
there weren’t little kids around. We started to question what we
were doing here. Those were some of the most powerful conversations we
had,” said Curt Kuipers, a Calvin seminary student who mentors the
house with his wife, Kristin. “Project Neighborhood is a bit of
a misnomer. It isn’t neighborhood that’s the project. It’s
community that’s the project.”

“Project Neighborhood is a bit of a misnomer.
It isn’t neighborhood that’s the project. It’s community
that’s the project.”

The project’s dual concept of community can be tricky for the people
who try to live it, Britton said: “Within those houses, there’s
a tension between those two aspects of living in the house…. There’s
a fair amount of energy poured into the internal community of the house,
wanting to be intentional about community, wanting to be open and honest
about resolving conflicts…. There’s been an attempt to balance
the internal community with the impact students want to have on the external
community.”

And ultimately, no matter what impact the house has on the neighborhood,
each group of students within it moves on. Yet even with their transient
populations (mentors also rotate out), the houses remain influential —
hospitable, safe and neighborly places — in their neighborhoods.
“We like to talk about the ministry of presence,” said Witte
of this phenomenon.

The students who live in the houses are social work, chemistry, education
or special education, biotechnology and English majors. Yet they have
similar reasons for living in community. They talk about depth in their
relationships with God and with others. They feel the need to connect
meaningfully with their neighborhoods. They love to serve. They embrace
social justice and environmentalism.

And several of them share something else in common. They have spent a
life-changing semester in Honduras, experiencing a third-world culture
firsthand. (All but one member of Peniel House are Honduras alums.) Schmitkons
could have been speaking for that group when she said, “I came back
from Honduras, and I had a lot of ideas about how I wanted to live when
I came back. And this was a good way to keep myself accountable.”

Even with the best of intentions, community life has its drawbacks. Most
Project Neighborhood participants acknowledge that, due to community commitments,
homework is a struggle. “It’s harder than it would be if I
were living in a different living situation. But I make do,” said
senior Brad Veldkamp, of Hudsonville, Mich., a Peniel resident.

And community can be addictive: “This is kind of positive-negative,
but I find it hard to avoid spending too much time with people. It’s
so tempting to hang out,” said junior Koinonian Sarah Page, of Glen
Ellyn. Ill.

Community can also be overwhelming. “I get times where I need to
escape a bit, and there are so many people here,” said senior Sarah
Weeda, of Manhattan, Mont., another Koinonia resident.

“There is simply never enough time,” Ippel concluded. “There’s
not enough time for us to be what we want to be in the neighborhood. There’s
not enough time for us to be what we want to be in the house. There’s
not enough time for me to be what I want to be as a mentor. It’s
because everyone’s busy, and the students are way over-committed.
I think there needs to be good conversation about it. There needs to be
a balance between this realism and the ability to dream a little bit and
hope for all the things that God can do.”

Though there are no current plans to grow the program, there is also
no dearth of applicants for Project Neighborhood. “When I think
about these houses, I think it’s a real gift that we’ve given
these students …,” said Britton. “What an amazing opportunity
to have — a unique and amazing opportunity to have — to experience
Christian community. They’ve never had that experience before, probably
never will again.... Students living in these houses are in a sense blessed
because they’re going to be better members of their community, have
better connection to their churches, be better friends and better spouses
because of this experience.”

At the close of their Wednesday business meeting, Harambee House customarily
gathers around the piano for singing. Tonight they sing, “In my
life, Lord, be glorified.”